FOIA requests

Suing the CIA

Since 1995, the CIA had maintained the CREST database, which contains every “historically valuable” record that had been declassified, at the US National Archives in College Park, Maryland. However, this was available on only 4 computers, and only during limited office hours, a fact that the CIA admitted on its website that "may be inconvenient and present an obstacle to many researchers."[2]

In June 2014, MuckRock sued the CIA, arguing that the CREST database was "technically public, but in practice largely inaccessible." The CIA initially claimed that it would take up to 28 years to put the material online. However, it later reduced this estimate, and all 13 million documents were published on the CIA's website on 17 January 2017. This was after MuckRock user Michael Best announced a kickstarter project to put them online by printing out the records (at the CIA's expense) and then republishing them on WWW.[2] Many concern Operation Mockingbird, the CIA's project to control the commercially-controlled media.[3]